Makes Me Wanna Holler

Nathan McCall- Makes Me Wanna Holler. In this honest and searching look at the perils of growing up a black male in urban America (San Francisco Chronicle), Washington Post reporter Nathan McCall tells the story of his passage from the street and the prison yard to the newsroom of one of America's most prestigious papers. A stirring tale of transformation.—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The New Yorker. From The New Yorker McCall's account of prison life is unsparing, but it seems to be a rare example of how a stint in a correctional facility actually corrected. Being behind bars 'forced me to go deep, real deep, within and tap a well I didn't even know I had,' McCall writes. . . . The book's final section traces McCall's journalistic career, which leads him to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and, finally, to the Washington Post; we see his attempts to deal with both the racism he perceives among his white colleagues and the difficulties attendant on his own upward mobility. . . . There's an inevitable slackening of energy--and, perhaps, of perspective--in the book's final stretch. . . . Still, the honesty of {McCall's} self-examination remains unrelenting and often startling.